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Do Campaign Donors Influence Polarization? Evidence from Public Financing in the American States
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This article was previously presented at the 2014 State Politics and Policy Conference, Bloomington, IN. Complete replication data and the appendix are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/jjharden For helpful feedback we thank Scott Adler, Kevin Banda, Dan Biggers, Nate Birkhead, John Griffin, Jens Hainmueller, Luke Keele, Ryan Kennedy, Ray La Raja, Carlisle Rainey, Steve Rogers, Anand Sokhey, Jason Windett, and Chris Witko. All errors are our own.
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November 23, 2015
Abstract
Does the source of campaign funds influence legislative polarization? We develop competing theoretical expectations regarding the effects of publicly financed elections on legislative voting behavior. To test these expectations, we leverage a natural experiment in the New Jersey Assembly in which public financing was made available to a subset of members. We find that public financing exerts substantively negligible effects on roll-call voting. We then find a similar result in an examination of state legislatures. We conclude that, counter to the logic of the US Supreme Court, pundits, and reformers, the source of campaign funds exerts minimal influence on polarization.